Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to transactional, addressable communication, and more particularly to a system and computer program product for transactional, addressable communication.
Discussion of the Background
Electronic mail (“email”) was invented back in the 1970's and has since become an indispensable tool for businesses. The reasons for email's popularity are its ubiquity, ease of use, inexpensiveness and broad functionality. From a functional standpoint email is used for messaging, collaboration, task management, information storage, and the like. Despite the rise of alternatives such as text messaging, social networking and specialized collaboration apps, email still reigns supreme, especially in business contexts. Email has become a critical business and social tool used for everything from the exchange of letters to the negotiation of business documents. By some estimates email is the most popular and crucial method of communication over the Internet.
The term “email” applies both to messaging systems based upon the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) as well as to Intranet groupware systems, such as Microsoft Exchange, which do not use the same protocols and storage formats as traditional SMTP mail servers, but are interoperable with SMTP systems and present the same interface as traditional email programs.
Email is a store-and-forward system allowing multiple people to compose, send, receive, and store electronic messages over a network. Pieces of information are formatted and sent around in discrete chunks, each known as an email or an email message. These messages are usually composed on a client computer in a mail user agent (MUA) or in the context of a browser for webmail. The user's content is then wrapped in an envelope of headers containing metadata about the message. The wrapped message is then handed to an SMTP server which routes the message to other SMTP servers in the delivery path. Typically, the sender retains a copy of the message in a Sent Messages folder and the receiver receives a copy in his or her Inbox. The receiver can then store the message, or create a new message from the contents of the received message by replying or forwarding the message.
Despite their incredible strengths, traditional email systems have some major flaws as well. There is no way to easily update content in traditional email systems because all content is additive. Email attachments do not solve this deficiency. Attachments might be updated outside of traditional email systems and then re-attached. However, this commonly results in multiple incompatible versions of attachments being sent around. Users don't know what the authoritative version is and, consequently, users will often update the non-latest version, thus effectively losing changes potentially made by other users. Additional users might modify those versions thus further compounding the problem. For any reasonably involved collaboration with multiple parties the situation is unworkable.
There is no way to precisely refer to an email. Emails are only referred to (or addressed) imprecisely. The lack of addressability of emails in a traditional email system severely cripples the kinds of things one can do with email.
Email is overrun by spam. Whole businesses have sprung up around providing spam filters for traditional email systems. Unfortunately, because email doesn't provide native support for handling spam, spam filters only keep one step ahead of the spammers, if at all.
The identity of the sender of an email is easily spoofable. Since email is completely decentralized, adoption of any standards to even attempt preventing email spoofing is virtually impossible.
Email lacks the ability to guarantee delivery. This makes relying on email for any mission critical process or communication a very risky proposition.
Email lacks the notion of a certified email or, said another way, proof-of-sending. Once again this makes relying on email for any mission critical process or communication a very risky proposition. Email also lacks the notion of certified content. Notably, email lacks the ability to certify that the content received is the same as the content sent. Even physical messaging services like US Postal Service, FedEx or UPS can only certify the sender, but not the content of the message.
Email lacks the notion of an authoritative, mutually agreeable versioned audit trail. In the prior art, every party to an email chain is entitled to their own and it is commonly no possible to reconstruct an authoritative audit trail of the email chain. This uncertainty makes it difficult to rely on email for mission-critical business processes.
The present invention overcomes these and other limitations associated with email systems while preserving essential characteristics of email.